Archive for February, 2017

If you are involved in the shooting sports, you find out very quickly that there are a lot of products out there that have “tactical” as part of their name.

What does that mean, “tactical”? Just that the product is supposed to help one prevail in a gunfight. Everything from accessories for a defensive handgun, to clothing and beyond, carry the tactical name.

A lot of training programs also claim to pass along tactical skills, which also means that their course of instruction is supposed to increase the odds of survival is there is an armed encounter of some kind.

Long time reader knirrir was kind enough to give a heads up to the following magazine article.

Rumor has it that this was originally published in Outdoor Life magazine in 1918. If so, then it is an interesting artifact in that it shows the beginning of modern tactical training, even though some of the techniques outlined are a bit dubious.

Case in point is the first picture, where one is supposed to use a judo throw to send any female companions to the ground so they would be out of the way during a gunfight.

I have to admit that this has a certain appeal, should one be spending time with a companion who is prone to doing the wrong thing during high stress moments. I remember a time when walking alongside a road with a young woman, and a minor fender bender occurring in the street caused her to try and shinny up me like she was a cat and I was a tree.

Sounds a lot more amusing than it was at the time, as she essentially anchored both of us in place at a time when it would have been better to be able to dodge should the need arise.

Tossing people about aside, the pictures above don’t do too bad. How to carry concealed is addressed, including small of the back which shows some forward thinking.

Interesting to me is the thoughts on retaining the handgun. Modern training methods spend a fair amount of time on handgun retention, which means holding on to your gun if someone should try and wrestle it away from you.

It is a bit different in the old Outdoor Life article. It appears to be taken on faith by the author that those interested in armed self defense will not only carry a handgun, but also a large fighting knife. This makes holding on to your gun relatively easy, as the violent criminal is either trying to grasp the sharp blade of a knife, or trying to wrestle a handgun away while one goes all stabby with the knife.

Would I advocate any of these methods? I think the training we have now is better suited to the times, actually. But that doesn’t mean the old ways are completely worthless.